As I read through the final season of The Bluest Eye I found myself becoming more and more haunted by the ideas represented and how Morrison managed to convey them. She takes an idea that is socially unacceptable and disgusting and gives us the impression from the other side.
As I read, I was disturbed by her ability to make these things seem more reasonable just because we were able to get a perspective of the people that did these things. For example, as disgusting as it was, you managed to get this totally different picture of Cholly’s motives behind raping his daughter. We see most of his life (at least the moments that shaped it the most) and, for me, I saw a totally unexpected reason for what he did. I mean, I knew that his anger and drunkenness had to have something to do with why he was so unstable with his family, but also Morrison’s statement about how “his reactions [the them] were based on what he felt at the moment” and that he felt that he was not "useful to her" was so interesting (161). Her ability to depict how all the unfortunate circumstances had this effect on Cholly and how these things connect with his current actions really made the book for me.
I also had a flashback to when I saw the movie The Reader last year. One of the main characters, Hanna, was illiterate. To keep this devastating secret, she held a series of positions and jobs in her life in which no reading was required. In one such position, she was one of the prison guards at a concentration camp during the Holocaust. In her trial, I almost found myself feeling sorry for her, even though she had been one of the people that I have grown up to despise. Everything she ever did in her life was in hopes of keeping her illiteracy to herself and making sure that no one found out, even if it was at the expense of her (and others’) happiness. So, I guess what I’m getting at is that these people—the director of The Reader and the author of The Bluest Eye)—have the ability to change minds with their words and productions. They managed to play with my head enough for me to question things that I had always been certain about in the past. Things that I was raised to believe in. It’s these two examples that really haunt me for the ideas they convey. And these ideas are that there really are two sides to every story. I’m not trying to justify what Cholly did or for the actions of those involved in the Holocaust, but I do find it interesting to follow the path that led up to these terrible things. It’s almost as though we can learn something from studying the sequence of events so keenly and it might help prevent such things in the future.
So I think that from these two examples, we can definitely see how writing can be one of the best methods of therapy. These terrible events are scarring and traumatic and sometimes telling a close friend isn’t enough. You have to just sit there and keep writing until the ideas that are flooding out of your head slow to a trickle and you can make sense of the emotions. I also find that writing can makes things seem as real (or as unreal) as you want. If something happened, you can write about it in a way that directly addresses that this happened to you specifically or you can write something else entirely that encompasses your feelings but in a more indirect way (which is probably a copying method that lots of people use).
Writing also gives the opportunity to put your soul into something. There is no fear of what someone might think what you’re saying and no worry that you aren’t making sense because the only person who’s going to see this is you. Sometimes, I have found that it is hard for me to address problems in my life by merely thinking about them. For example, over Christmas break I was having big problems with my best friend and we were fighting a lot. When I came home, I found that merely sitting and trying to sort through everything wasn’t helping and I could usually avoid these thoughts easily enough. However, I got out my journal and began writing about it and it was amazing how easily I was able to better understand my feelings about the whole situation and how much better I felt just getting all these feelings out on paper. For Pecola, I could see how writing about her problems would help because she’s so ashamed of some of the things that happened to her. Writing, then, is clearly something that can help society just by it’s ability to cure and serve as a method of therapy.
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